IPMC Sensor Integrated Smart Glove for Pulse Diagnosis, Braille Recognition, and Human-Computer Interaction

© 2018 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim Flexible sensors, which can meet human ergonomics requirements by virtue of compliance, are widely used in smart wearable electronics. Compared with existing piezoresistive, capacitive, and piezoelectric sensors, flexible ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) sensors are promising for wearable applications toward monitoring diverse human activities, due to their advanced characteristics of passive, and direction identification. Here, a fluid-bed-like reactor is developed for batch preparation of the IPMC sensors, which can overcome those problems including time consuming, and poor batch stability of the devices prepared by the conventional electroless plating method. By the new method, a large number of sensors with good batch stability can be produced in one-off preparation and in a very short-time process. Sensitivity of the sensors can reach as high as 2.99 mV in strain range below 1% and high stability above 98.2% over 8000 bending cycles can be achieved. Based on the above, these sensors are successfully integrated into a smart glove, which can diagnose the subtle pulse, perceive the precise braille, and control the robot hand timely. This work presents a practical strategy for large-scale production of advanced IPMC sensors and will accelerate the wide application in smart wearable systems.